Conversation 512-012

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I'm going to get Tom Buck to sign these contracts between you and me and Bob Echoloff.

And if you sign these four, then we'll get...

Will it be an empty message to you?

I think it is.

It's had a very salutary effect on our current policy of approval.

Well, I put it in one place.

Yeah, I just took a cigarette and gave it to Tom Criddle.

Oh, good.

And according to Criddle, I was already sending a second 17-page speech up there, and he said, No way, Drew.

That's right.

We're doing this.

There he is.

Well, he sort of feels, sort of, sort of... And who knows?

Maybe he is.

He may be a...

If it works.

And also, another thing.

Of course, I feel this.

This whole field of science has really a black spot on this.

They feel guilty about it.

And therefore, they feel very guilty about it each time they see him here.

Yeah, otherwise it wouldn't be working.

There are great and powerful interests that are opposing this for the wrong reasons, the oil interests, the coal interests, and the rest of it.

They all say that they create an atmosphere of interest, but we have got to build a really powerful future for the world.

Well, I don't know if Peterson has told you, but the projections on oil show an adverse balance of payments out about 10 years that are just unbelievable.

Peterson's for this.

export for two reasons.

One, because it solves that oil problem.

Two, because it puts us in an export cluster.

We'll be creating a product of high technology, where we're good, and which we can sell to other countries.

Sure, sell a plant.

Well, they'll tie, you see, they'll tie together.

No, no, I took it out completely.

And, uh, when we get our...

I know what your feeling is.

The feeling is that there's no political sex appeal in that.

I, I... Well, I don't, I don't necessarily share that.

I, uh...

The staff said that, but I tell them my view is this.

I don't think there's no political sex appeal in that, in the energy meeting.

But it's, it's a, uh, it's an idea on the water thing.

God damn it.

There's no political section to deal with the president.

There's a hell of a lot in Southern California.

That's right.

Oh, absolutely.

And other places.

Phoenix.

It's a very tough issue in Phoenix.

And I think the fact that we're moving on this issue, that it means when you go into the campaign, John, those stories, those states, you don't know where they're going to source new water.

And water will make this a garden spot.

Yeah.

Well, we're pumping on it.

And you are pulling it the hell away.

Well, we're doing a whole conversion thing on NASA.

And this will be sort of the centerpiece of that.

I have my domestic issues poll back.

I don't know if Bob told you, but we had ORC do a domestic issues poll.

And there's some very interesting twists and turns in it.

Very interesting.

Crime is way, way up.

Environment is number two.

Way up.

If you get a chance...

Oh, no.

There are a couple of leading questions in here which I disregard.

The others are straight, what do you think are most important?

And there's some very interesting regional breakdowns in here that surprise the heck out of me on some things.

Oh, things that I would have thought the South would have been much stronger on, they weren't.

The fact that the South is stronger on revenue sharing,

Is for it.

And it makes you wonder about Wilbur Mills a little bit.

Why do you think that's happening?

I don't know.

You know, there's a funny thing going on among the Democratic leadership with Albert and Boggs and so on.

It's very hard to understand.

I sent one removed from Long last night at dinner.

And he was critical of Mills.

And I suppose reflects Boggs to some extent.

That's true.

An incidentally highly complimentary view on the press conference.

Russell Long.

He said he and his wife sat and watched it.

And he said those answers you gave on the Washington demonstrations, he said, he made a Nixon Democrat out of me that night.

He said he was exactly right.

And then he went on and he talked about that the rest of the evening.

He couldn't get him off of it.

He's very, very strong.

individual writers and all the rest of it.

Instead of going to see the cops and don't praise them and so forth and so on.

But you don't know anything impressive about those police chiefs.

And I don't know that you've got the same impression.

They were a lot of decent looking men.

You know, they were right from the heart.

Right from the heart.

That guy on my end, I liked him.

Big old fella.

I'm a Texas guy, you know, I'm sort of an emotional kind of guy.

It impressed me a lot that they were not the goddamn thugs that the press makes them out.

The other thing that I feel was this, on this demonstrative thing, is that, dude, the more on our side here is that

they don't want to, they don't want to go off and bash people's headsets.

But they are, you see, the demonstration reaction has nothing to do with the war, believe me.

It will help a lot of people who are against the war or against the demonstrators.

It has to do with their gun reaction about, frankly, some drugs, nasty little brass cans, people that are, that disobey the law, people that litter the streets.

You look at the poll, and it's very interesting.

Campus violence is almost off and gone.

That doesn't make any better argument.

We're down 30 points.

But violence is up.

And it's shifted now from a focus on the campuses to a focus on just, you know, this disillusioned kind of... Well, the poll is well worth spending some time on.

We're going to go ahead and try to hire Jackie.

Oh, God, yeah.

For whatever we have to pay him and get him in here and get him in place.

I just wanted to know that we were moving on.

I think on the driver, if he is that kind of a guy, I want him to be a show.

Look...

Part of this is, part of this about God is basically, this really is a good thing, and the rest is just talking about it.

You can't do anything about people's morals, but you gotta talk about it.

God asked me to go back and read this part of the New Testament.

Christ, Paul, when they talked about sin, they didn't do anything about it.

They really didn't do it.

Well, that's been the history of the world, but somebody's gotta talk about it on this chapter.

He's a real tiger down for us.

We're going to crack down on a few people.

We're going to crack those guys in that curse.

We're going to crack the French.

We're going to crack the... Well, here's what I'd like to do.

Two things.

One, I'd like to have you talk to Jack.

I'd like to spotlight him.

Number two, I'd like to have a meeting like you did the other morning with the State Department people.

Because see, what has seeped out now into the door of the meeting over here was that the president took a vigorous head-cracking position on narcotics with the military.

And that just came as a natural seepage from that meeting over there.

Now, I think we'd get the same sort of mileage out of a meeting with the State Department people, where

All right.

You simply say, all right.

It's a nice way to bring some of the State Department people in for breakfast.

If you don't mind, could we add one other department?

I mean, I don't think there's going to be enough State Department people to do it.

What I mean is, how long do you have enough?

Well, remember we had Irwin at the military thing.

I'd suggest we have Laird's man, whoever he designates, maybe Packard, at the State Department thing, together with Richardson and Mitchell, and this cross-fertilization, so that this continuing thing, the focus now is going to be on foreign relations.

Oh, Mr. Peterson.

Yes, yes.

And Mississippi is going to give up its customers.

That's right.

They're going to give up their customers.

Well, he's aggressive as hell, and he's a turf fighter, and we've had our problems in getting the jurisdiction over to Mitchell the way he's going to consolidate the thing.

But, uh, uh, Rossides is an able old guy.

Can we get him more of a play in this field?

What I've had is Rossides is an old football player.

And I have more confidence in him than I do in some of Mitchell's guys.

I agree with you.

The judgment was made originally to give this to Mitchell.

Now, just from this, we can do this.

We can just let this thing evolve.

And just from the combination of Rossides with the backing of a strong secretary,

Cousins is going to come into there, right?

All right.

We'll just stay out of the way.

Tell the provost that I want him to have a meeting with the proceeds.

And at another level, I want you to have a meeting with Matt Woodward.

You're going to see Conley anyway, right?

Right.

I see him all the time.

You say it all the time.

We did this before you were here.

Would you tell him this?

Right.

The president...

President, he said, if you had been here, that's where it was, but we didn't have strong enough leadership, right, Kennedy?

Because now that you're here, we want to reverse some of it.

But in other words, we want to fight like hell for this.

It was much like, for example, these IRS people.

I think we could, the IRS is the greatest investigative government body there is.

Let's have him assign two or three hundred IRS agents to this thing.

See, talk about what can he do within his department, on top of it, through IRS and customs.

How does that sound to you?

I really want to crack those.

I'm going to crack the doctors today.

I may need it myself.

But I want Richardson and others to crack down these drug houses.

We have got to stop this stuff.

I mean, I really feel that guns and all that sort of thing.

Right now, of course, there's an awesome guy.

Okay.

You don't agree?

Oh, sure.

Yeah, that's fine.

I think that's a, I think that's a natural.

And, uh, Ryan says that there is, there's a, there's a factory in here.

Oh, that's where you heard that.

I see.

You know, where they send it is to Mexico.

All right, can we...

I'd like to go over where that factory is and close the goddamn thing.

Now, can't we do this?

I don't know.

Let's find out.

Well, I get it all right, but when I... Don't you understand what I mean, Sean?

The way to plan it like this is to be mean and tough as hell.

We'll find out.

Let Conway think that we're depending upon him.

All right, let Mitchell think we're depending upon him.

Unfortunately, Hoover won't get into it, will he?

No.

Why?

I suppose that's it.

He sees that this thing is a picket of competing jurisdictions.

He lost the battle when BMDD was set up for justice.

And I guess he figured he just wouldn't get his nose bloody.

One thing to watch for in this poll is this matter of busing.

You asked us to look into a possible constitutional amendment on busing.

Bussing is zilch in this poll.

People could care less about bussing.

It's way down.

So unless you have to look at it, you might live.

You see, the point is, with the market operating, we may be able to cool this down if it's handled the right way.

It looks to me like that is what ought to be done.

Even the interest in the South is not terribly heavy on bussing, which surprises the hell out of me.

It's very heavy with the blacks.

But among whites, it's just hardly any.

You mean they want it?

Yeah.

Blacks, they're way up in interest.

And they're way up in Wanted.

The whites are way down in Congress.

You don't guess that probably wasn't happening?

I'm not sure that there's even a question on that.

I don't remember.

Now, I've got Morgan in that, too.

We're having a meeting upstairs right now where, line by line, Mitchell, Romney, Van Dusen, Ray Price, Morgan are going through this thing.

And I'm getting them to sign on.

It's going to be a very good night.

I want that state to put out the same data that we put out that

All right.

We'll find some way to locate it.

How about the wedding?

Couldn't we put it out so it breaks with the wedding news?

Great.

Thank you.

Whether he's on the front page, or on the other hand.

I think so.

On the other hand, the, uh... Oh, right.

And it balances the family image, and so on, and it'll keep the press safe.

Otherwise, they'll just be hanging around here looking for, you know, disasters and whatnot.

That's a better idea.

Uh... How do you mind, Peterson?

Oh, fine.

Fine.

But you got my memorandum.

I did get it because many of the dictating machines broke down.

But I then tried to reconstruct it.

There's a Bob and that's it.

You've got to know, Peterson, about Charles Schultz and Gardner and Christ.

I think.

In terms of the fact that we cannot give to our political, to people that are dead political opponents, we cannot give them our information.

Well, I have begun on that line.

This meeting the other night was interesting.

Gardner didn't hardly open his mouth.

He took no notes.

And he just kind of sat there most of the time.

Gardner does not appear to be a very bright guy.

I've never watched him in a group like this, but this was a very dazzling group that he pulled together.

This fellow, Lamb, did not come.

Lamb, Hagerty at Texas Instruments.

Two or three other guys like that were the heavy contributors.

And it was very stimulating, very stimulating, because they got all caught up in this Japanese dilemma and the problem of whether we should try and do the same kind of national planning and what that does to the country and, you know, this kind of thing.

And it was good to have Bernie Schriever there.

He was fine, and it was a kind of a leavening process for him, because he's very hip on this R&D, domestic R&D thing.

These guys said it couldn't be done.

And no, no, they think it can be done.

As a matter of fact, they think we're wasting our R&D money right now.

Well, you got my friend, didn't you, about the damage, the way we're raising our research.

Yes.

And I really believe that.

Well, that came out of this meeting, too, about the business of some cities.

Did they agree?

Yes.

Now, they have a different approach than you do on the subject of applied research development versus theoretical research.

Hagerty's point is, you get almost no return at all out of theoretical research to begin with.

It's a luxury, it's a thrill.

My point is, what does he want to do?

Just continue to subsidize it?

No, no, no.

His point is this.

All research must be directed.

And it's management's function to say to the R&D people, here are our three goals for the next ten years.

Now, go ahead.

He says, if you just chunk money out there and say, gee, we'd sure be interested in anything you fellas find.

He says, you deserve to lose your money.

Oh, don't get anything out of it, right?

A big paper on the sex life of the white guy.

Yeah, he says, you just get nothing out of it.

And I got a number of real nuggets out of this meeting in terms of things that I just hadn't been thinking about.

One of them is this.

We have never asked our departments and our agencies to sit down and define their mission.

What the hell is the mission of the Department of Transportation?

Is it to simply make the truckers rich?

You see, the Defense Department does that with every one of its units.

We ought to do it here with the Department of Transportation.

Absolutely.

What is FAA's mission?

What is the mission of our foreign tourists?

Well, once we get them to define their mission and you prove it, so to speak, then the question is, how do they get from where they are now to an accomplishment of their mission?

That's the second step.

And Robert McNamara was there, and his contribution to that was this.

He says, I don't think we have anybody in the bureaucracy who is competent to define the steps that must be taken to accomplish a mission.

He said, at least that's true in the Department of Defense.

He said, the only way to go is with outside outfits who can marshal good minds

with non-operational responsibilities to come to grips with a problem of that kind.

You see, that's why they use RAND.

He said, those are the kinds of problems that they invoke RAND on.

RAND standard research.

Yes, I agree with that.

And he said, that's why it wasn't a good expense.

It would be a fear of money.

These poor universities are looking to do that.

But the universities, unfortunately, they are producing thousands of students, but they're just spinning their wheels.

Let's use them.

Yes.

Well, anyway, it's gotten my thinking running in a direction that I want to broach at the domestic counseling meeting Tuesday, because we're going to talk about goals and policies and so forth.

And I think we can inject these people with an assignment, maybe one that I should attend.

It wouldn't be a bad thing to do as a preview for what we're going to do in San Clemente later.

I may comment.

I may not stay as long.

All right.

We've had a roundup, and we've asked them for their inputs, and we've boiled them down, and we're going to feed them back to them now.

If it fits into the schedule that's put on.

Yeah.

Well, it's strictly optional with you.

Well, I know what I mean.

You let the other cabinet members know when they come.

I think they'll come anyway.

I think we'll get a high percentage of them.

So I wouldn't, I don't think you should feel that.

Have you done any more thinking about the public service jobs?

Yes, and I've done some checking on the bill.

Any changes?

It would create only 150,000 jobs.

Now, they did not get me, and I sent it back last night for additional information as to how fast it would create those jobs.

But it doesn't look to me like it would be very fast.

The one real political problem with it is that the Republicans made a very strong stand against it on the premise that you'd veto it.

And the congressional liaison guys are saying, geez, now you've got a real problem if you don't veto it.

So I've asked them to suggest to us how we could get off that way.

I just wanted you to know, John, that I just sent to the Congress today the empty message, and I told my press secretary, Ron Sager, to point out that this is a bipartisan effort that you and Jeff Holliday alluded to, and Johnny Capozza and others, and others, without your help, we wouldn't have come this far.

All right, well, you, when you go on, if you were the guy, I would appreciate it if you'd like to mention the fact that you and I talked, and that I emphasize, and I consider this a by far as an effort, and that we, this is one that we should go far beyond any judge, and you call us later.

Thank you.

Good.

Thank you.

Okay.

I want to come back to you on public service jobs after I get a little better.

My only problem is that if somebody makes you a fire job yesterday, they're going to beat you over the head with the rest of the next two years.

If you don't, the problem goes up.

Now, the other side of the coin is we've got to take a hard look at what the hell is going to happen on the economy and see what we can do with it.

Everybody really knows.

If I could say to you, we'll get 150,000 jobs out of this in the next three months, then I wouldn't have much trouble with that.

Because we could then get around to our guys and say, you know, we'd expected unemployment to improve and it didn't, and now we think we better get aboard here and get a position.

But you've got an awful lot of guys now who have voted against these jobs.

And unless it's got a payout, uh... What do we have as an alternative?

Manpower revenue chain.

And that provides some of your jobs, too.

Oh, yes, it does.

It provides more.

This is more money.

What they say is... What's their argument against manpower?

Well, their argument against... Is that it riles Peter to pay the ball?

No, that it tears down categorical programs, you see.

and that that's antithetical to their philosophy, that these are good programs and so on and so forth.

All right.

Now, on Camp Pendleton, you made a note on the news summary to proceed with the lease as soon as possible.

Well...

We have already leased three miles of the beach.

We're in a fight with Hebert over the balance of it, really.

And I just wanted to be sure this wasn't a change of signals from you.

Okay.

I'm in.

From what I can tell, I'm going to do something with it.

I meant the door is closed on the one and the other.

It isn't closed.

And we would like to hang some for a while.

And what we'll probably do is to, McGregor's going to have a memo in either day.

It will probably involve having Hebert and one other in, and I forget who it is, but some Republican has been very helpful on this, who is susceptible and will be a bellwether on the thing and can bring Hebert along.

It just goes out of my mind right now as to who it is.

But anyway, that's what's ahead on this, and we'll be back to you on that.

But just hang in with us for a while.

Do they have any other, uh, there's, uh, uh, one of the, uh, economic groups and so forth, but it's, uh, what is it, uh, on the, uh, so crack, it's a bad note.

Stein reported staff meeting this morning on these two new, uh, announcements and, uh, hung by a crape all over everything.

I got it.

Yeah, he seems to have been...

The thing that worries me the most about it is that this thing shows that the economy is the real troublesome domestic issue.

And that nobody, pretty much nobody, is optimistic.

And this was in the last...

There is a problem with people who are not optimistic about the economy going up.

They've got money, and they're not buying.

Now, there seemed to be a bit of optimism a month ago, didn't there?

In late March, and then it went down.

I don't know if the international crisis doesn't, I mean, monetarily screw it up.

I don't know.

Paul Davies was here the other day, you know, food machinery.

And George and I had lunch with him.

And he's on the board of three or four major corporations and said that everyone is deferring capital expenditures.

Everyone is taking a defensive position.

And he's just been around the board meetings.

He said the international thing accounts for a lot of it.

Just an uncertainty about the international monetary situation.

That's cool.

Yes.

But you can get a real argument among investors, particularly Wall Street types, about whether it really is cool or not.

And that was his verse.

So that is one of the things I flagged in here that concerns me very much.

There are questions in here on unemployment, and then there are questions on just the economy generally.

And the two big items are fear items, crime and economy.

What are Schultz's, is he at Stanley?

No, George is in Omaha this morning.

That's Zach.

I figure it's a result of increased labor force.

Right.

Actually, employment is up.

But, uh, entrance into the labor market, or whatever account for it.

It goes to 6.2.

One tenth higher.

That's what it was earlier in December, wasn't it?

Yeah.

It was, huh?

Yes.

Four months ago, I think.

Well, he said, you know, we... What do you think we should do about it?

He said we predicted a plateau.

And he said, we've got it.

It's a bigger plateau than we've ever had since 1958.

And he went back and he traced these unemployment plateaus back and one was four months and one was six months and this one seven months.

And he said, we still think we're doing the right things.

We still think we'll come down off of it.

When we do, we'll come off in a rush.

And there's a danger of overcompensation and so on.

And everybody around the table was saying, oh, come on, Herb, you know,

Let's get with it.

So I think there's just a general feeling here that we are perhaps at a point where we've got to take stock of the whole picture and see if we shouldn't be turning some crank harder than we are.

Well, I think this public service thing, we have turned it, of course, in summer youth, we've turned it way up.

and uh yeah we're high as we possibly can all right yes it will it'll that'll be 900 000 jobs this summer yes sir what is that that's more or less that's that's youth almost entirely that's how much more than last year oh 280 000 something of that kind it's up substantially and uh

We will see, I would suppose, some soaking up of these numbers when that program is in full cry, which will be a month from now.

Yeah, I don't know how that comes out of the wash, but we did it primarily because of the urban riot situation.

I think we've got to think in

crash terms about manpower and at least know what we can do, know how much it's going to cost and what the tradeoffs are on a very short-term basis.

Now, we've asked Jim Hudson to think this through for us, and I think he's got some things in mind that we can do.

It has to be a new bill.

It has to be a supplemental appropriateness.

We've lost the manpower.

Well, no, we haven't lost it.

It'll go back for hearing now.

You see, we tried parliamentary maneuver.

And I said substitute.

But your point is to come up with the, if we veto this, we've got to come up, it seems to me, with the veto.

That's what I told him.

The same day.

Exactly.

And they're on that time frame.

They will have something for us.

And that's something that creates so many jobs.

Exactly.

That's exactly the same thing as temporary.

And you know, talking about your great goals, I'm more and more coming to the opinion that

One of them has to be 20 million new jobs for America.

And then that leads you into all these other things, exports and technology and so forth, as offshoots of that go.

That's, now you're talking 20 million new jobs, or basically, if they're 80 million now, 100 million jobs by blank.

Yep, yep.

100 million jobs by blank.

And we just put it in simple terms.

And that's the way to do it.

There's a headline, 100 million jobs by blank.

And to be accomplished over history on top of 20 million jobs.

And this is the areas where we're going to get to.

Yeah.

Getting back to the...

Yes, there are.

Even on irons, they generally go very heavy.

But there are other factors that are on the more confident side, too.

Retail sales are going pretty well.

Consumer credit's way up.

Which means people are buying.

Yes.

Right?

They're buying on time, which is an indication of confidence.

Retail sales.

And some of the consumer...

that is the University of Pennsylvania awards survey, the Dodge survey, and others.

I mean, it depends on which survey you look at.

This is the one that struck me, right here.

This is what people think, right?

And we know this is honest.

That's right.

I think this is a good one.

People are not confident about the future, is that it?

That's right.

They say this is...

one of the two really major problems that this country now faces domestically.

And there's no indication of confidences.

Well, we didn't ask it quite that way.

It wasn't pitched quite that way, but unemployment is one of the questions that was asked.

But the thing that concerns me about the whole economic thing, and I don't know a damn thing about it technically, is that we just seem to be kind of teetering at a point of equilibrium.

We're not making...

the forward progress i think once it starts and once it's observable that it it goes this way we had it going a little bit and it seemed to flatten out uh with the with it uh very smart yeah and i think it was a german thing because it's all sort of beyond everybody's control and they know something's wrong and they don't know quite what and then maybe they better wait it's played out yeah

Sure.

But you know, a lot of people in my parents' generation remember the bank runs.

And that whole thing smacks of... That's it.

The younger generation, down 18 to 21 in this thing, they could care less.

They are just totally...

Carefree.

Economy, unemployment, the whole business.

Everything's going to work out fine.

There's an extraordinary break in the industry.

What are they worried about?

Water?

Oh, pollution and that kind of thing.

They're worried about crime.

Then they're worried about a lot of other social issues, particularly in the higher education bracket.

Race is not high.

Not high.

About 30%.

It's high among blacks, but it's not high among... As far as the economic thing, though, is concerned, do you really get to the point?

Don't you get to the point that you can't just talk people into the confidence of the United States?

That's one way to look at it.

Others say you can't.

Well, I don't think you can because credibility... Sure.

Everything that you do is taken away by Walter Cronkite lifting his eyebrow when he says it.

And impugning the credibility of it.

But you just can't talk.

I don't know.

It's that trend line that they put up there in that graph behind you that makes a difference.

And that's just got to be in terms of extrinsic circumstances creating their climate.

So...

I think so.

I think it's in that area.

I don't know if that's the one.

I agree with Michael.

Let's put it in dramatic terms and spend a couple billion dollars and do it, but spend it now.

500,000 jobs.

Go ahead.

If you have to veto this thing, I don't want you to do it bareback.

I want the same day for you to have something before.

I think you're going to have to veto it because it's probably just too damn bad.

But I think also that you could come right off with a better, I mean, one which provides more jobs.

This bill is inadequate.

Something like that.

Well, that's what I've told Jim that we want.

And you've written a memo about it, you know, about short-term focus.

And so we're going to crank it up.

By next year, we may not want to have these kind of things.

But we want them now.

Right now, we want to knock that unemployment thing down some.

Well, we'll be back soon.

He didn't say.

But in the end, it's going to come down.

And when it starts, it's going to come down rather sharply.

That's what he says.

Why?

Well, I know it feeds on, I guess.

Whether that plus the fact that it follows the economy.

and he says basically the economy is improving and unemployment lags at in its improvement but when it starts he says it typically has a flattened experience after it's been going up and then he says it comes down on a fairly sharp curve historically now he says

That's the point, you see, because historically these things haven't lasted this long either.

You get to be a contrarist if you talk to these guys a lot.

We've got to remember historically that the period of inflation and so forth was much longer.

Yes.

Yes, you know what I mean.

The term of, you see, when people just didn't think anything was ever going wrong.

Now, therefore, the period of downturn may be... Well, the cycles are shorter.

The recession, so-called, was shorter.

I see your point.

Yeah, well, really, it isn't going to be counted as a recession compared to success.

That's right.

In context, it was an adjustment.

Main thing is to show some confidence in ourselves, right?

But I don't believe we can talk people into it.

All right?

We got to act.

And we're going to get back to you.

We're going to call the action.

No.

And you get this big credibility thing where you say, at least it's going to be great.

And one of these statistics comes out in four days and knocks the box down.

The time seems to be improper every time.

And I try to, I have a fairly good time.

I'm extremely terrible at lighting.

I had a list in California, and I said on the pilot's case, it will continue until the last time they come down.

And the first one to go up.

I think you have to lean over backwards that way.

You have to not predict, right?

So that they can say that you're wrong.

Well, we're pretty, I'm in good shape.

I think the one prediction you made turned out to be true about the stock market.

It still seems to be active recently.

Well, the market's coming back very nicely.

It had a little dip, you know.

I know.

But it's about $900.

Yesterday, it was $109 at a high.

Yeah.

So... $121.

Yeah.

Oh, I'm sorry.

No, it's $119.

It was...

It was... Did they go to $950 at one point?

Quite.

Oh, I thought it was $936.

I could be wrong.

I looked at the... You know, out of the markets, there is a kind of...

I just checked.

Nevertheless...

Well, you know, it's just a housing thing.

Good.

And on the other thing, oh, let's put the, put the story to us.

You know what I mean?

I, uh, I don't want to, uh, I don't know.

I mean, I consider the part of the housing, I consider the economic part of the future next year.

The other things are going to work out.

The economic thing.

All we've got to move is, I guess, something we have to do.

Do you think so?

We'll just have to.

I don't know.

I don't believe Jonathan.

I don't go up.

Our group will say, well, we've got to have a way to price for it.

That would have a negative effect on him, in my opinion.

Well, we turned an awful lot of gas from the 80s at the end of the day on this whole wage thing.

It's like a typical boardroom talk.

And then you say, well, what do you want the president to do?

Well, you know, I don't know.

Of course, we don't want price controls and we don't want profit controls and all this kind of stuff.

Sure.

They want wage control without profit control.

Sure.

Can't be the same.

So do I, you know.

Well, I'll tell you what, I'm going to shoot for putting that in this housing statement in your reading for Sunday.

Cool.

Or on the airplane coming back.

If you can pass it out, I've got to go.

Okay, uh, you were very helpful to us on that, uh, school thing.

Oh, really?

Well, I mean, I'd like you to.

I don't think this is, uh, this is one of our things that we're clearly going to be doing what we're up to.

That's right.

And, and, uh, Mitchell is, Mitchell is very content with this, I think.

Uh, but, uh, I, I would feel very comfortable if you get a chance to go through it.

It's about 30 pages.

Give it to me and we'll write it out next week.

Okay.

David Wood.

Okay.

Uh-huh.

All right, let's go.